If you watched the Olympics, you noticed a major difference in how the athletes competed relative to even just a few years ago. The revolutions in sports technology are astounding and, more impressively, still in their infancy. It’s a testament to both the advances in STEM innovations and the desire of athletes, their coaches and team owners wanting to succeed. Sports—at least the way we grew up watching them—are going to undergo some serious changes thanks to (or as a result of) technology.
Athletes Now Commonly Use Wearable Tech to Train
Short of risking getting caught taking performance-enhancing drugs, professional athletes will do just about anything to enhance their performance on the field. These days, that means technology—and there is no longer any shortage of innovative options for them to use in training and during games. Since the owners of many professional franchises are successful businessmen, they know a lot about what it takes to get ahead. It’s not at all uncommon for team owners to have an extensive background in technology development as modern-day culture demands the very best that athletes have to offer.
Among the popular devices for today’s athletes are pieces of wearable technology. Many people find it pretty awesome that they can track their daily steps taken and calories burned with the tiny technology packed into a Fitbit. Admittedly, the tools that pro athletes are using are a little more impressive than that. Athletes use everything from tech specific to helping them improve precise areas of their sports to what have been described as “brain zapping” headphones to make their training as intense as possible. In the NBA, players have begun using technology to track their shooting consistency from different areas of the court while NFL teams are constantly using tablets on the sidelines and Major League Baseball has finally adopted full-scale instant replay. Many athletes, in fact, have even invested in technology start-ups, indicating that the trend is not likely to go away.
Star athletes have been able to do some pretty remarkable things with technology, including shaping and sculpting their bodies into optimal playing condition. Getting ready to play physically is now being supplemented with athletes using technology to prepare mentally as well. They can use products to help them sleep, eat properly and basically put the best versions of themselves on the field when they compete. They now know every bit of information they could ever want to know about themselves, including constant access to their statistics and videos of their performance to analyze as well as things like body fat percentage, weight and endurance levels. As the products get smaller, smarter and more common, there very well could be a time in the near future that sees athletes competing with all sorts of devices during the game as well as before and after.
Watching Sports in 360 Degrees
Technology has allowed us to accomplish and have access to some pretty amazing things over the last couple of years, knowing that someday soon virtual reality capabilities and 3D printers will be as common in households as computers and televisions. The new Oculus Rift came out earlier this year and more advances in virtual reality are not far behind. That includes an all-new way for us to watch televised sports. If you’ve ever used a virtual reality viewing device, you know that by turning your head, you can see the whole environment as if you were actually there. Now, imagine being able to see an entire sports stadium while watching from home—for free.
Typically, VR is used with an app that creates images and can be viewed through virtual reality glasses as if you were really there. If watching sports in VR really were to happen, something miraculous would need to be done. I imagine it would mean working out some 360-degree feature with cable companies so that professional sports leagues could use the footage and transfer it to special VR receivers that would then be able to expand its scope and project it in the VR viewer. Sounds easy enough. Then again, there might be some super easy way for the folks at Google or Apple to stream the coverage without the need for any extra support or device creation.
Another intriguing option has come with the emergence of augmented reality, or AR. Using AR, developers can impose graphics over the real images of the world to augment the immersive experience. You may have heard of a little game called Pokémon Go. That’s augmented reality—when the characters appear in front of you with the physical world as the backdrop. When it comes to watching sports, it’s possible that there will soon be a way to display augmented stats or other graphics in the same way, making the viewing experience much more interactive. It’s weird to think how far technology has come that it could soon revamp one of the oldest experiences today’s younger generations know in watching TV, but, with the capabilities at our fingertips, this could just be the beginning.
New Sports Tech Trends that Will Last
Much like everyday life, many sports are undergoing tech-catalyzed revolutions that appear poised to forever change the way the games are played. Just since 2015, there have been a number of breakthroughs when it comes to the tech that athletes use to stay informed, stay fit and stay prepared. Since professional athletes and sports franchises have access to, let’s just say, boatloads of money, they’re really starting to spend it on using technology in order to improve their on-field results. The innovations that are emerging are becoming increasingly vital to athletic success and, as the saying goes, could soon become a regular ‘part of the game.’
Many professional teams, like many of us, have come to be completely reliant on technology over the last few years. For those passionate about stats, one of the up-and-coming buzzwords is ‘next-gen stats.’ In football, for example, teams and fans have constant access to statistics like touchdowns scored, yards gained and passes thrown. By implanting RFID chips into the shoulder pads of every player, however, the NFL has access to so much more. For instance, they can see how fast a player runs, how abruptly they can cut, how hard they were hit, how much force they supply when hitting someone else and how many miles they run during the course of any given game. Coaches can, in turn, use this data throughout the week to optimize their game plans and give their team the best chance of winning.
The impact that virtual reality could have on sports can potentially change the games forever. Again, in the NFL, quarterbacks specifically have begun using VR headsets to practice their plays. This helps in two key areas: it allows them to learn the plays more easily than studying them from a book and it prepares them for game play without the need for any physical exertion. Should they ever wind up getting injured in practice, however, they’d probably soon be introduced to some injury prevention technology. These technologies have the potential to reduce the risk of athletes suffering minor injuries like pulled muscles or major ones like ACL tears. NFL teams are required to have an independent neurologist on the sideline now and the concussion protocol they have initiated is as advanced as it gets and, like all sports-related technology, is poised to continue expanding.
How Far We’ve Come
Wearable technology has burst into our lives and created the notion that, someday, science might help us create a truly bionic person. Just imagine the already superior athleticism that athletes possess amplified even more by tiny pieces of equipment so powerful that they could impact the outcomes of games, seasons and careers. Pro athletes make a pretty big deal about having the latest gear and, when it comes to shoes, cleats, sunglasses and jerseys, it’s all about ‘look good, play good’ for them. Now, however, more and more pros are taking an interest in all that technology can do to help them improve their performance legally, quickly and for a long time to come.
Some even think that wearable technologies will become as important to athletes as their basic equipment. These sensors allow them and their coaches to track performance metrics in real time and in almost any sport. The world’s best cyclists can even wear glasses that display all sorts of data, like cadence, speed and heart rate, directly into their field of view without them ever needing to stop. Even in the Paralympics, athletes are able to use a newly developed wheelchair that tracks stats, like miles traveled and the frequency of their arm strokes, giving them an idea of how they can improve their all-important times. In fact, memebrs of the International Olympic Committee realize that we are very rapidly approaching the superhero stage, intimating that athletes will soon have many new advantages with which to work.
Athletic technology has been in the mix since around 2000, but mainly only covered physiology and nutrition when it first emerged. Now, it is able to help prevent injury, help athletes recover from injury and help them learn every bit of data they’d ever want to know about themselves. Athletes can get the information they want and need much more rapidly as opposed to it taking days like when the technology was in its infancy. It also allows coaches to test their athletes in the actual conditions they would be playing in, rather than in a lab or on a treadmill. These super athletes can go through an entire day’s worth of training and be presented with an entire week’s worth of computable data at the end—and it’s only going to increase from here.
A Robotic Media Movement?
So, we’ve talked about some of the tech-fueled changes that have come to the games themselves as well as some new innovations sprouting up in regards to how we watch sports at home. Another big part of professional sports is, of course, media coverage and (surprise, surprise) that seems about ready to undergo an overhaul as well. We keep hearing all this talk about shaping 21st century students so that they will grow up with strong creativity, problem solving and collaboration skills, decreasing the likelihood that robots will ever be able to take their jobs from them. Well, as we’ve known for a while now, not every job is safe and, apparently, the Associated Press has created a robot that will be able to cover sporting events for them.
The news outlet has created software that will allow it to cover games nationally using artificial intelligence and automated data. The technology is capable of automatically generating news stories to report on and summarize games that human writers were not able to attend. Since there are so many sporting events across the country on any given night, including major and minor league games as well as multiple levels of college athletics, the software is being used to help cover as much of it as possible—without stealing anybody’s jobs. This move comes after the AP started using AI to cover business and finance back in 2014 and, after a year of testing, made the automatically generated stories available publicly.
The AP says that the software they are using is capable of generating error-free game stories for publication on the wire. They even said that it wasn’t that tough to integrate and only took so long to launch because the AP took time to have their editors critique and edit the stories during the trial period in an effort to improve any shortcomings. One of the most important factors for the AP in making this software work was speed. Anyone in the news industry will tell you that if it isn’t timely, it isn’t news. The hard part is not only getting the stories compiled accurately, but getting them completed quickly. Since other technologies help make statistics available essentially up-to-the-second, the AP’s process is enhanced. It seems like a pretty cool concept, especially to traditional sports fans and, who knows, maybe a robot wrote this entire blog.
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